Infrastructure as Code

"Infrastructure as Code" or IaC, when you search for this term online you will get loads of information and all this information has a different interpretation of Infrastructure as Code. Even if you search for it in the VMware context it will deliver you loads of different VMware blog posts and product related web pages.
Although the all the different interpretations, there are some things all information has in common. They all have the same basic concept, have IT teams to treat IT infrastructure the same way application developers manage / develop their applications, so treat it as code. Human readable software code that is. This concept is also known as DevOps. And most of the information will also tie this concept to Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery practises.

If you are looking for additional information on IaC, there are two Forrester reports that are very relevant and therefore are referenced frequently when writing about IaC:

• How A Sysadmin Becomes A Developer written by Chris Gardner and Robert Stroud
• Lead the I&O Software Revolution with Infrastructure-As-Code written by Chris Gardner and Richard Fichera

I mentioned that there is an abundance of information on IaC and most Vendors have multiple product or solution pitches around it. In this blog post I'm not going to focus on the well known solutions, I would like to provide some information on a less known solution, which has the obvious name Infrastructure as Code.

This particular solution is a offering from VMware's Professional Services Center of Excellence (PSCoE) and it basically delivers an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) focusing on getting vRealize Orchestrator (vRO) coding to "the next level". In other words provide a toolchain that provides the tools a Developer needs, but is missing from the standard vRO solution. So what features does this PSCoE IaC solution bring:

• Work Easy – Powerful tools for Management of vRA/vRO content
• Work Together – Share Code, Validate, Do Peer Review
• Quality Control – Quality Gates, Unit Testing
• Improve Efficiency – Solution Modularization, Dependency Management, Versioning, Parallel Releases
• Release – Frequent Releases, Policy Gates, Sites Distribution
• Step Back in Time – Rollback releases, Troubleshooting

As you can see for yourself the PSCoE IaC solution is focused on vRealize Automation, let's look in a bit more detail how a vRealize Automation environment looks when the PSCoE IaC solution is deployed.

Currently this PSCoE IaC solution is only available as an complete PSCoE offering, this offering includes the Installation and configuration of the required software components, Onboarding training for in-house developers and Initial guidance.

The solution is not a one-size-fits-all solution, there are customer / environment specifics that can influence the solution. If you are interested in learning more about this solution offering contact PSCoE or find them during the upcoming VMworld events.

Lastly a small word of caution, this PSCoE IaC solution is not a good fit for all vRealize Automation customers. In general customers that already have adopted the DevOps way of working and/or have in-house (Java) developers would benefit from this solution, most of the time this will be the larger enterprises that already have a (Private) Cloud Solution in Production.